HUEY Helicopters

When I attended Army Flight School in 1979, one of our table talk questions concerned the "Huey" designation. As most of you are aware, Army helicopters are named after Indian tribes except for the AH-1 Cobra. Anyway, painted on the side of the tail boom are large white numbers to designate which aircraft was flying. If the actual tail number was 67-12345, the number was 45A. The "A" meant there was only one aircraft with the last two numbers ending in 45. If there was an aircraft 69-23445, it would be called 45B. We called these numbers "buzz numbers" so people could easily see which aircraft was in the traffic pattern and to identify aircraft when they were conducting flight training at terrain flight level. The early test UH-I's has a "buzz number" that said HU-1 and at a distance it looked like "HUI." For some reason people started calling the aircraft "HUEY." Not sure if this is 100% true but it was something my Instructor Pilot told me and I knew I better remember the story if he ever asked again!

HUEY even ended up on the right tail rotor pedals. The left havin BELL on it.

That's right... the early designation was "HU-1," and the name "Huey" also had to do with a popular cartoon series of the day.

Any of the 1:72 scale UH-1D/H models by ESCI would make a great start... they were very well-detailed for such small kits.

FITTER out

HUEY came from the designation UH-1 or Utility Helicopter number one. The pilots and maintainers started calling it HUEY and the name stuck. When anyone says HUEY helicopter it is associated with the UH-1.